Music Entrepreneur's Guide to Content Marketing

If you have read The Music Entrepreneur, you should be on your way to having an attractive brand and value offer, and a website designed (from UX to imagery and copywriting) to communicate your brand and your services effectively. You should also have a sales funnel in place, with correct CTAs and an offer ladder, and ideally productized services (if you’re a service provider).

Are you there already? Great…

There’s no 100% accurate way to predict your target audience reaction, so the only way to make sure your website, brand and value offer is attractive is to go out there and promote it.

As I explained in The Music Entrepreneur: you need to be an artist and scientist. Make sure you quantify your results and that your record your promotion activities. That’s the only way to implement effective marketing in the music industry and avoid an emotional bias.

So how can you start promoting your project?

Remember that 2nomads’ expertise and focus is in content marketing for music entrepreneurs, so that’s what I’m going to recommend you do.

Your blog and other free content is your primary asset here. You still don’t have a blog? Create one. How is your target audience supposed to know if your services are useful otherwise? You need to generate trust before trying to sell, real trust based on real facts. Paid advertising without a big brand behind won’t give you that.

So, the idea is to generate as much relevant content as you can, if you aren’t much of a writer or content creator you can always hire someone else. We offer our Showout™ plans just for that.

When you’re done generating a fair amount of content, go out there and promote it, free channels like posting in social media, answering questions in forums or Quora will work alright. Don’t focus on too many platforms at first, if you’re a B2B music project, meaning that you sell your services or products to other business owners, I would go for Linkedin.

Remember, speak to your potential audience, no one else, and if you noticed they aren’t responsive at all, it could be your content or the fact you aren’t speaking to your right audience. But here’s the magic of social networks: you can ask them. Just send them a private message and ask them if they find your content useful. Listen to them, if your services or products aren’t good enough, improve them. If they aren’t your audience, search for it elsewhere.

What you’re doing here is branding, you’re getting the word out there, your target audience is starting to know your music project exists. If you use their feedback the right way, soon enough you’ll find a product and promotion that works.

If your content is useful and well designed to sell, it will also generate leads for you. Especially if you work on creating valuable content offers that require your audience to subscribe to your newsletter.

Much better than bombarding people with useless ads, right? You help them out for free first and based on the value of your help they make the decision of talking to you or not. Sounds fair to me. It gets even better, the automation magic of the internet allows you to help them without investing tons of your time, so you don’t have to worry about helping people who won’t ever hire you.

Content Marketing Automation

After you’ve learned the places your target audience frequents and that your offer is attractive to them, it’s time to boost your marketing process with automation.

When you find a task that can provide value to your audience and has the potential of generating sales for your project, you have yourself a winner. That’s the kind of task you need to work hard on automating.

Paid advertising can automate your content promotion for you, even if your SEO is good, you can still get some extra quality visitors by using ads correctly. Facebook, Linkedin, and Google are some of my favorite PPC providers.

That said, you have to consider they’re not for everyone since each platform has its particularities that might not be compatible with your music service or product.

That said, it’s worth testing them out. PPC managing would deserve a book of its own, and luckily for you, there’s a lot of free content out there. But you should always start with small tests, analyze the results and continuously improve your PPC campaigns based on real data.

The other major tools for automating marketing and sales are email autoresponders and CRMs. These tools are meant to handle all of the potential clients, leads, and opportunities. When you’re dealing with many leads, that’s a tool you want to have to automate all the repetitive tasks. From client onboarding to invoicing.

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Action Steps

If you still don’t have a blog, work on it. Believe me, it’s way cheaper in the long term than paid advertising. If you aren’t going to do it yourself, make sure you hire a good copywriter.

Create a content offer, this a free product and part of your offer ladder. The idea is to give your potential customers the opportunity of getting value from you before making any purchase decisions.

When you have it all ready, go out there and start promoting your free content. Let your audience learn about who you are and how can you help them first. Use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Quora or Linkedin, whatever social network you know your target audience frequents. Focus on one for now and remember to quantify your results and improve your approach based on that.

Have problems thinking about the type of content you should create for your audience? Leave a comment below and I’ll help you with some ideas.

Research the topic of PPC. Based on your previous results with different social networks go for one of them and use them to promote an offer content. Set a low budget and analyze the data afterward. PPC campaigns require constant tweaking. Research techniques such as re-targeting and blocking users who have already seen your offer.

Research Email Automation tools and CRMs. I would start with a simple CRM such as Zoho CRM so you get familiarized with the concept and its potential.

Depending on the size of your project and its complexity I recommend you look into ERPs. And administrative tool meant to handle most aspects of a business, including CRM, accounting and more.

If you have any questions about this process, don’t hesitate to post them in the comment section below.

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About Ivan Duch

Iván is a long-time musician and entrepreneur. Nowadays he merges his knowledge of attraction techniques, marketing and his passion for music to craft impactful online presences for the music industry.